Toby Zerner
Chief Technology Officer at Affinda
Australia
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolToby Zerner is a seasoned technology leader and hands-on full-stack engineer with 13 years of experience, currently serving as CTO at eMedici while also contributing as a Senior Frontend Developer at Affinda. He blends strategic product leadership with deep open-source roots—his contributions span prominent projects like Laravel, Mithril.js, and the popular Flarum forum ecosystem, where he has improved both API and UI features. Known for pragmatic refactoring and reliable migrations (including upgrading large apps to newer frameworks), he excels at bridging backend services, frontend UX, and deployment configuration. Based in Australia and with a background that uniquely includes medical studies, Toby brings a methodical, user-focused approach to building resilient, community-oriented software.
13 years of coding experience
Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery - MBBS, Medicine, Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery - MBBS, Medicine at University of Adelaide
Github Skills (42)
debug10
javascript10
virtual-dom10
back-end-development10
eloquent10
laravel-mix10
app-framework10
configuration-management10
databases10
laravel10
refactor10
mithriljs10
php10
forum10
web-framework10
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
flarum/flarum
Dec 2014 - Dec 2018
Simple forum software for building great communities.
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:8 releases, 139 commits, 26 PRs in 3 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Toby primarily focused on upgrading the forum software to Laravel 5 and refactoring codebase, including removing unnecessary components. They modified configuration files related to caching, filesystems, and mail settings. Furthermore, the user was instrumental in setting up the application's environment by modifying boot files and configuring the database and nginx server settings to correctly route requests and handle errors. These modifications included adding necessary service providers and ensuring the application was correctly configured for frontend and backend operations.
forumphpcommunitiesflarumforums
flarum/framework
Dec 2014 - May 2019
Simple forum software for building great communities.
Role in this project:Back-end & Front-end Developer
Back-end & Front-end DeveloperContributions:12 releases, 5347 commits, 237 PRs in 4 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Toby primarily focused on extending the Flarum framework by adding and improving functionalities, specifically translations for new features, and extending existing extensions to add and customize specific features. The commits demonstrate work across both the back-end (API) and the front-end (UI components). Their contributions span multiple extensions to add, maintain, and improve core platform functionalities.
forumjavascriptphpcommunitiesflarum
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